“The wheels are off the cart.”
That’s how the artist and writer formerly known as Eve Ensler, now V, described the world in an essay this week. She went on to catalog terrifying developments around the globe and specifically in the U.S.
I won’t list them; readers of this newsletter can surely make their own list. V’s ran nineteen paragraphs. Nothing there surprised me; even so, by the time I got through it I think I’d forgotten to breathe. The cruelty evident in the world is devastating to lives, families, communities, countries, systems of government, and cultures.
V chalks it all up to “a chaotic, demented acceleration of the most violent and cruel aspects of patriarchy” – she calls it “psychopatriarchy.” She writes that all ills grow from that. Others would argue that capitalism is to blame, or colonialism, or racism. Some say the human tendency to take all it wants from wherever it wants is the root of all cruelties, including those caused by climate change. Some blame religion, one in particular or all of them.
I’ve watched people argue hard about the cause. I think that’s because it’s how it works with a plant; only destroying the root will destroy it. I know that’s true of what naturalists call invasives – plants that choke out their neighbors. I’ve cut down a 20-foot-tall invasive shrub in my yard twice, just to have it sprout again – not only where it began to grow, but way out in the field beyond that.
In the case of that shrub, the root of the problem is clear. But the human race is much more complex, and I’m not at all sure anyone can point absolutely to one origin of our cruelty. More importantly, arguing over the roots can be a distraction from the blight.
That invasive shrub analogy only carries me so far, because while it’s concerning enough to warrant my tending, it isn’t cruel. It doesn’t invite my rage. It doesn’t carry the risk of despair. It doesn’t overwhelm me to the point of turning away.
After V’s nineteen paragraphs, I found myself breathing again when she started to write about what can be done: Take it to court, starve it out with strikes, vote it out, “name and shame it (speaking out, marches and rallies), refuse to normalize it (write about it, make art about it).”
“What we cannot do,” V writes, “is succumb to it or become them – numb, selfish, hollow and cruel.” I only take issue with one word there, the word cannot – because, indeed, I can. I am capable of becoming cruel. I am surely capable of turning away.
I’m human after all. I am vulnerable to all of that. The pain and helplessness can be unbearable enough to tempt me to float along in my pretty darned comfortable life.
V says our pain and rage “will be our salvation.” Really, I think, feeling this awful could save me? Yes, because those feelings mean I still see. And if I still see then I can, as V suggests, keep describing that reality, and describing another future. A future “so inviting, generous and caring” that others will want it too.
The bottom line is that I have to refuse to let that future go. Even when dear friends tell me we’re at the end of the world. Even when cruelty wins the vote. Even if liberation seems to win the day only every once in a while, and far away.
For me it goes beyond not turning away. I need to keep behaving in ways that contribute to that future. Like architects and builders who imagined structures so huge and complex they would take generations to build, I need to engage in what some call “cathedral thinking.” The project is a world in which anyone can thrive as who they understand themselves to be, without barriers built to keep them from thriving.
I may well not live to see it, but I’ll never give up the task.
Lucinda J. Garthwaite
Founding Executive Director